Melissa Lakey is an artist based in Joshua Tree, California, where the windows of her art studio look out onto the Mojave Desert. She has exhibited her paintings across the US in group and solo shows. 

Inspired by the desert where she lives and a childhood spent dreaming of becoming a cowboy, Lakey’s colorful mixed-media paintings explore the magic of the American Southwest. Born from an intimate, symbiotic  relationship with her environment, her artistic practice is both inspired by the natural world around her and a reciprocal homage to the sense of wonder she draws from it. Infused with luminous optimism, Lakey’s paintings are spaces of joy and possibility, where the warm sun or the blue glow of the moon impart the viewer with a tantalizing sense that anything could happen.